CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

On Wednesday it was one of Mom's mid-week stays with Billy, so Jacob just came home with me after work and stayed. Mom had left us food in the refrigerator and we ate and then relaxed for the evening. There was some programme on television about performance cars, mostly Japanese. Jacob watched with interested, still dreaming about having a Skyline one day.

"It'll take me about ten years to save up," he sighed. "Can't you give me a raise, Sam?" He stuck his bottom lip out.

"I could, but it wouldn't be enough for you to buy one that much quicker. You could always look for a wreck and do it up, like I did the Corvette."

"Yeah, I guess I could."

"There are other cars similar that would cost less," I said then. "What about a Supra?"

"It's ok, but I want a Skyline."

He was pretty adamant on that and it put an idea into my head. It was less than two months from Christmas and although I intended to get him something, I had absolutely no idea what. Maybe I could find a wrecked Skyline somewhere; then he could just use his own money for parts. I knew even a write-off wouldn't come cheap, but I didn't care about the money. I would just love to see his face if I got one for him.

Now he grabbed a cushion, dropped it into my lap and curled up on the sofa, resting his head on it as the programme ended and a movie was announced to start after the commercials - 'Predator.'

I stretched my legs out and slouched back on the sofa, sliding my arm around Jacob and idly stroking his arm as we began to watch the movie. It was only ten minutes in when the doorbell rang.

"Who the hell's that?" I muttered.

"Maybe it's your Mom, not wanting to walk in on anything," Jacob smirked.

"Shut up." I slid out from under him and the cushion and went to the door. Paul was on the other side of it.

"Hey, Sam."

"Hey," I said in surprise.

"Are you on your own?" he asked.

"No, Jacob's here. Do you want to come in?" I offered.

"No, I just wanted to have a quick word with you. I'll catch up with you another time if you're busy."

"It's ok." I stepped outside and pulled the door closed. "We were just watching a movie. What's up?"

He cleared his throat uncomfortably and avoided looking at me. "You know I Imprinted on Leah...obviously."

"Yeah," I grinned. "Not still in denial, then."

"No. It's kind of awkward though."

"Why? I know it takes some getting used to, but..."

"It's not that," interrupted Paul. "I found I actually like her. We're pretty similar - hot-tempered, you know?" He laughed a little.

"So what's the problem?" I prompted.

"She's your ex. I mean, aren't you bothered by it?"

"Of course not," I said. "Listen, when I Imprinted on Jacob, I loved Leah. But when you Imprint, your life pretty much becomes about that person. I kept on seeing her, but I just made her miserable because all I wanted was him. I was a real shit to her, if I'm honest, I should have ended it sooner. You Imprinting on her is what she wanted. I don't mean you exactly, but someone. I hoped she'd find someone else, whether it was an Imprint or not."

"Oh, good." Paul grinned now and looked me in the face for the first time. "So you really don't mind?"

"I said so, didn't I? Like you said, I don't know anyone else is alive other than Jacob. So how's it going, anyway? With Leah?"

"Good. We fought over it to begin with, but she seems happy about it now. It changed the way I feel about everything."

"Yeah, I know," I said. "She's all there is, right? All you want to do is things that make her happy?"

"Yeah." Paul reddened slightly and then backed away. "Ok, well I'll leave you to it. Thanks, Sam."

"Sure." I closed the door and went back to Jacob.

Paul wasn't the only one asking me for help that week. On Friday morning, Embry turned up at the shop.

"Can I talk to you?"

"Yeah, what's up?" Jacob was out fetching parts and I had to wonder if Embry had been lurking outside waiting for him to leave.

"I just wondered if you need a spare pair of hands, for a few hours maybe. Christmas is coming up and I'm short on cash."

"I don't know what you do with your money, Embry, you never have any," I grinned. I knew he'd begun dating the girl he met in the store - Suzie, her name was - and took her out just about every night. "Anyway, why aren't you at work?" I added.

"Well, that's the thing..." He sighed heavily.

"Did you get fired? Shit, Embry."

"No, I didn't get fired!" he snapped. "But I did lose my job. The store laid off two staff."

"Right before Christmas?" I said in surprise.

"It was two weeks ago. They can't compete with the new department store. I've been trying to get something else ever since, but there are just no jobs out there."

"Hell, that's rough," I said, my mind beginning to tick over immediately. "Look, I can't promise anything. Come back on Monday, eight o'clock. We're always busy at this time of year anyway. You can do the servicing up until Christmas and I'll think about what we're going to do after that."

"Seriously? You're giving me a job?" Embry's face lit up.

"Yeah"

"Thanks, brother!" He flung his arms around me in a sudden hug.

"Alright, get off me," I laughed.

Embry working at the shop turned out to be a Godsend. By the time he had been there a week I knew I couldn't tell him to find another job once the New Year came, but I thought of a way we could expand the business a little to keep all three of us busy. Jacob and Embry both thought it a great idea. The two of them would work on the day to day jobs which were always enough for two, and I would do restorations. A number of people had asked me about the Corvette since I'd had it on the road and talking to people indicated that I'd get a decent amount of jobs in if I offered the service. I decided to wait until the winter rush was over and then advertise. In the meantime, I had to find a Skyline that wouldn't wipe out my savings completely. I roped in Embry to help one evening when I wasn't with Jacob and we searched the internet.

"I can't believe you're going to buy him a car," Embry said enviously.

"Yeah, well I have to find one yet," I sighed, scanning through the ads we had found, the cheapest one still being more than I earned in a year. It had to be the R33 model - that was the one in 'Fast and Furious' that he liked.

"Wait, what's that?" Embry said suddenly, stopping me scrolling down the page. I looked at the silver Skyline he indicated.

'R33, registered 1996, spares or repair, front end, engine and suspension damage following accident.'

"Still, it's two grand," Embry added.

"But it's in Long Beach, that's nearly two hundred miles away," I mused.

"I guess it depends how much you want it. Have you even got two grand to spend?"

"Yeah, Embry, it's called saving," I grinned. "To be honest, I didn't think I'd get one for as little as that."

"You must really love him."

"Shut up and pass me the phone."

I called the number on the ad and asked some questions. The guy selling the car had taken it away from his foolish young son who had spent a lot of money tuning the car's engine to a ridiculous amount of horsepower, raced it, lost control and gone head first into a tree. Luckily the kid survived, but the car would cost a fortune to fix and had no insurance. The owner let slip he wanted to get rid of it as quickly as he could and I thought I could probably shave a little more off the price if I went to look at it. I arranged to go on Thursday, knowing I wouldn't be doing anything with Jacob in the evening.

"You can come with me," I told Embry. "We'll take Jacob home first, then go back to the shop and hitch up the trailer."

We did just that. I told Jacob I planned to hang out with Embry for a while and once he got out of the truck, we hurried back to the shop, picked up the trailer and set off for Long Beach. We made it just before eight-thirty and found the car sitting in the front yard, the front end sunk low on damaged wheels, hood crumpled, front fender and one wing missing revealing mangled suspension, the windscreen smashed and various other parts missing, such as the rear fender, lights and spoiler which clearly had nothing to do with the accident. The more I looked, the more I found to have been removed.

"Looks like you've been selling off parts already," I commented to the owner.

"It was in an accident, obviously there's going to be bits missing," he grunted.

I opened the trunk and noticed the spare wheel wasn't there. I looked inside the car and found there was no radio or speakers, the seats were gone and even the steering wheel had been removed.

"Seats just jumped out during the crash, did they?" I said. "Not to mention the steering wheel, lights and a lot of other stuff. Come on, buddy, I'm a mechanic, not a stupid kid after a cheap car. I drove two hundred miles to check it out, but I'm quite happy to go home without it if we can't come to an arrangement. What you got here is little more than scrap metal."

"Well...I guess I can knock off a couple of hundred dollars," the guy said reluctantly.

"Try five, then maybe we're getting somewhere."

He sighed heavily. "Look, I'll let you have it for seventeen-fifty. If that's not good enough, feel free to go home without it."

I pulled the wad of cash that I'd collected from the bank out of my pocket and started flicking through the hundred dollar bills. "Sixteen hundred," I said idly.

His eyes were fixed on the money and he sighed again. "Damned robbery," he muttered after a moment and took the pick slip out of his jacket.

Half an hour later we were on the road, the wrecked car secured on the trailer. Now I just had to think about how I was going to prevent Jacob seeing it until Christmas.

"Put it in our garage," Embry said at once. "Mom keeps her car on the drive. There's nothing in there but tools and bicycles and shit like that."

By midnight, the car was hidden in Embry's garage with a tarp over it and there it stayed until Christmas Eve when I took the trailer there early to collect it. Embry helped me load it up and came with me to the shop to get it off the trailer again. Christmas Eve was a Saturday and we weren't bothering to work. I drove Embry home and then went to Billy's. For once Mom had stayed home on Friday night, busy making preparations for Christmas, so reluctantly Jacob stayed with his Dad. He opened the door before I could even ring the bell and threw his arms around me.

"I missed you last night."

"Me too." I kissed him, hugging him tight against me. "You ready to go out?"

"Sure, where are we going?"

"Surprise." I had decided to show him the car that day rather than wait another twenty-four hours. Christmas Day we were spending the day with both parents and they wouldn't want us disappearing to the shop.

"Where are we going?" he repeated as I turned the truck out of the street.

"Work."

"You're kidding. On Christmas Eve? I thought we were closed," he said, disappointed.

"Oh, you'll like this, trust me," I grinned and refused to say any more.

I parked the truck and unlocked the garage door, then grabbed Jacob from behind before he could walk in and covered his eyes with my hands.

"What are you doing? What's in there?" he protested, laughing.

"Your Christmas present. I'll warn you, it needs some work." I steered him forward into the building until he was standing in front of the car, then dropped my hands from his eyes to his shoulders.

He stared, his mouth dropping open.

"Holy shit! A Skyline? Seriously, this is for me?"

"Yeah," I grinned. "Bit of a mess, but it's fixable."

"Oh my, God, Sam, it must have cost you a fortune!" he exclaimed.

"Not that much."

He turned away from the car and hugged me. "When did you get it?"

"About a month ago. Embry helped; it's been hiding in his Mom's garage since."

"Thank you, Sam. I can't believe you did this for me." He gave me a warm kiss.

"I'd do anything for you, you know that."

"So can we work on it now, then?"

"I thought your didn't want to work on Christmas Eve?" I teased.

"Well, I didn't know I'd have my own car to work on!"

"Lucky, I bought some engine components too, then," I said. "It needs a rebuild." I had used the cash I saved when I bought the car to get some parts from the warehouse. With the business discount I hadn't done too badly either.

We started by winching the engine out of the car and then worked on it for several hours before finally calling it a day. Then I drove Jacob home to pick up a few things before we went to my place. Mom was staying with Billy that night and in the morning I would fetch the both of them to spend the day at our house.

Jacob gave me my Christmas gift that night when it was just the two of us. An expensive looking new wristwatch with a message engraved on the back, which made my heart flip over as I read it.

'Sam, you are my life too. Jacob x.'

Delighted, I put it on immediately and vowed to only take it off when I was in the shower or working where it might get damaged.

As soon as Christmas was over, Jacob emptied his bank account buying parts for the Skyline and we took to working on it whenever there was a spare hour and on Saturdays. I bought a pair of Sparco seats and a matched rear seat for Jacob's seventeenth birthday and even Billy, my Mom and Embry bought him car parts.

It was the last Friday in January when the weather threatened to spoil everything. There had been light snow, which compacted and froze making the roads a nightmare. With a few days of mild weather beforehand, the roads hadn't been salted so the sudden freeze was a surprise. Around lunch time a lady brought her car in asking for snow chains and for once we were out. She called her husband for a ride home and said she would collect the car the next day, so I set off in the truck to fetch a supply of chains from Forks.

The cliff road was treacherous and I kept to a low gear, reaching the town safely but passing a crashed and abandoned car on the way. I collected the chains, got back in the truck and set off again for La Push just as more snow started to fall. The truck crawled along, under thirty miles per hour and I tapped my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, longing to get back to the shop. I couldn't wait for the winter to end so I could start the restoration business.

I switched the headlights on, keeping as close to the shoulder of the road as I could as I approached the bend above the cliffs and then out of nowhere, a blue van appeared from the other direction, half on my side of the road.

"Damned fool," I muttered. He was going too fast for the conditions and as he saw me, he braked and wrenched the wheel over to the right, but I knew exactly what was going to happen and there was nowhere for me to go. His brakes locked up and he kept coming straight at me. The front of the van smashed into my door and the truck slid onto the shoulder and kept going, wheels spinning. It seemed to happen in slow motion, the edge of the cliff gradually coming towards me, the truck breaking through the barrier and tilting, starting to fall. I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white and looked down, realising that where I was going to land was the rocks where the pack often used to sit. Fifty feet earlier and I would have gone in the sea; I would have had a chance. I closed my eyes.

"Jacob," I whispered. Then there was nothing.